Also, Lyssa Adkins has recently published her own review on InfoQ. I enjoyed reading it because Lyssa is so gentle, fair, and insightful. She puts a lot into connecting the Scaled Agile Framework with the Agile Manifesto and shows that there is a fantastic level of alignment between them. Her article is called “Agile Coaches’ Coach Shares Her View on SAFe“. Here’s a bit of a teaser from her article:

Based on the way the SAFe Big Picture looked to me, I walked into that class very concerned that SAFe would take away the teams’ creativity by “pre-chewing” the stories into requirements a la my project management days. I thought I might see the rebirth of “The system shall…” statements. I was also worried that SAFe would take away teams’ autonomy and reverse our still fragile belief in emergence; the diagram just looks so top down! These concerns put me on alert for anything that appeared to undermine the Agile Manifesto or the Scrum values.

A surprising thing happened in that class…..

Peter Saddington

Although I don’t know him well, the few small interactions I’ve had with Peter have engendered in me a great deal of respect for him. His fundamental philosophy of Agile and organizations is courageous and principled. I found out yesterday that Peter wrote a review on the Scaled Agile Framework back in February 2014. Please check out “The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) – A Review“. It is interesting and insightful. Great quote:

SAFe will be successful in the market. People will benefit. They just won’t benefit nearly as much as they might if they set out to do things in a fashion that truly supports Agile Values and Principles.

SAFe is good. It’s just not good enough. It provides some benefit, but endangers an organization’s progress toward really high functioning. As someone who has been in the Agile movement since before it started, I do not like it. It’s fast food. You can do better.

Mike Cohn

Mr. Cohn has written a really fun April fool’s parody of SAFe that, given the comments, surely counts as a review as well. It’s called “Introducing the LAFABLE Process for Scaling Agile“. Although it starts on a very humorous note, the comments are quite extensive and contain lots of great discussion. Here’s an important comment from Mike Cohn about the whole concept of scaling that gives you a taste of the discussion:

I don’t think “agile at scale” is a bad word. I’ve consistently maintained that projects should be as agile as they can be but no more. A project that requires let’s say 500 people will never be as agile as one that requires 3 people. But I can’t imagine the 500 people and 3 people being competitors. And, if they are, the bigger mistake made by the 500 person project is involving the other 497 people, not the process they choose.

Neil Killick

Neil Killick seems to have even stronger opinions about SAFe, and is quite direct about them. I like what he says in one of the comments on his blog post:

So you can go the SAFe path or the Scrum and Agile path. All you need to do i[s] figure out how big a cliff you want to deal with down the road.

I don’t personally have any experience with SAFe so I won’t make any big claims about it either way. However, I do appreciate that the popularity of SAFe, like the popularity of Agile/Scrum* will probably lead to studies showing modest qualitative improvements of 20% to 40% increases in productivity. Is this just the Hawthorn Effect at work?

When I help an organization with Agile principles and methods, I hope and expect dramatic measurable improvements. Sometimes this results in people losing their jobs. Sometimes this means people have nervous breakdowns. It can be very painful in the short term. SAFe, by it’s very name, seems to be anti-pain. That doesn’t bode well.

Here are a few other interesting links to information about the Scaled Agile Framework:

* There is no such thing as “Agile/Scrum” but that’s what lots of people call Scrum when they don’t do Scrum properly.

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